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QuiEdit: An Editor for Anyone Who wants a Quiet Life

Editors, like file managers and browsers, are legion. To carve out a niche for itself an editor needs to have some compelling or unique feature(s). QuiEdit is unique. No, really. It is. If you want to write, unplugged from the distractions of the digital world, it has to be a contender. How?

Once installed, starting QuiEdit reveals why it effectively unplugs you from the rest of your computer. Well, a picture paints a thousand words so here it is in all its minimalist glory: it's in the opening image of this article.

It's full screen. You can't resize or minimize it. The only way to get back to other running applications is by ALT+TAB. No fancy GUI, no menus, no buttons but it's your firewall against distraction. Strictly speaking, that's not entirely true. When you start it for the first time it is in full screen mode but CTRL+SHIFT+F will reduce it and you can then minimize it. If you close QuiEdit in either mode it will restart in that mode.

Finding your way around is by that ancient device, the keyboard. So CTRL+H is your first port of call.

Figure 2: All the keystrokes you'll need

Use the scroll wheel to view Help. CTRL+H again to clear it. Start writing. When you save your text you'll ge a surprise. Here's a short pasted section of text I saved and then opened with Gedit.

Figure 3: Shocker. It's HTML formatted

Yes, that's the default save mode. I like this uber-minimal editor but I would also like the ability to save as .txt files too. I contacted the developer who has kindly added it as a feature request on Github. That will complete it nicely.

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Biography

A retired but passionate user of free and open source for nearly ten years, novice Python programmer, Ubuntu user, musical wanabee when "playing" piano and guitar. When not torturing musical instruments, rumoured to be translating Vogon poetry into Swahili.